Martin Welsch

Contrary to all expectations, Paul de Man presents a strictly freedom-philosophical approach to reading Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality. This approach is exposed in the first Rousseau chapter of Allegories of Reading from 1979. (1) However, de Man only announces this reading, but does not carry it out. Rather, despite his declared intention, he drops the project in favour of a linguistic determinism through which the freedomphilosophical programme is suppressed and negated. (2) Nevertheless, the prospective interpretation can be delivered: in a critical counter and corrective-reading of de Man's text, which gives the freedom-philosophical starting point its right. In proceeding this way, a new, strictly freedom-philosophical interpretation of the second discourse will be developed. (3)

According to Kant, men cannot do evil for the sake of evil. A satanic act of resistance against the moral law is impossible, and therefore the idea of ultimate evil is called a "mere idea". However, it isn't impossible to realize the idea of satanic evil, as is widely thought: the idea of ultimate evil can be fully realized by the everyday evil of men, as if they were ultimately evil. Kant exposes this structure within his Doctrine of Right (1797) as an extension of his philosophy of radical evil, presented in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793). This interpretation will be developed in a close reading of the crucial passage-where it is the revolutionizing people of France who are held responsible for having realized the idea of satanic evil.

Utopia and dystopia are brought together by Kant and Rousseau to the point of their indistinguishability: Dystopia is the reverse side of utopia, utopia that of dystopia. The essay traces this structure in Rousseau’s œuvre – in Julie, the Discourse on Inequality and the Contrat Social – in order to uncover how Kant carried it forward in the Staatsrecht of his late Rechtslehre with regard to modern representative democracy and the problem of popular sovereignty.

Kant’s Staatsrecht in his “Metaphysics of Morals” likely represents the sharpest analysis and critique of democratic modernity after 1789. At the same time, it provides a unique outlook on the future of modern representative democracy. This has gone largely unnoticed, with scholars often lamenting the problematic nature of the late text, blamed either on the author’s supposed senility or on the inscrutable composition resulting from confusion during the printing process. Rather than affirming these readings, I will argue that they are merely attempts to wrestle with the brilliance of Kant’s philosophical rhetoric. Through a new reading of a key passage in the Staatsrecht, I substantiate this claim by reconstructing Kant’s late account of representative democracy and its future.

Im ersten Kapitel stelle ich den „Forgotten Kind of Writing“-Ansatz in seiner von Leo Strauss und Heinrich Meier vertretenen Originalversion vor und möchte ihm dabei in seiner Eigentümlichkeit gerecht werden (Kap. I). Diese Darstellung kulminiert jedoch in der kritischen Anmerkung, dass der Ansatz streng genommen nicht nach einer vorrangig erkenntnisorientierten philosophischen Rhetorik fragt. Wie man ihn dahingehend modifizieren kann und was man dabei beachten muss, diskutiere ich dann (in Kap. II) mit Blick auf das text-philosophische Programm von Paul de Man (und Rousseau). Anstatt beide Ansätze zur Erforschung philosophischer Text-Rhetorik gegeneinander auszuspielen, geht es mir im Schluss (Kap. III) um eine Würdigung des je unterschiedlichen Potenzials beider Varianten des Ansatzes. Im Mittelpunkt steht hierbei die je verschiedene Rolle der Erfahrung des Lesers*: Die eine Rhetorik will ihn scheitern und verstehen lassen, die andere einen Raum philosophischer Freundschaft erfahrbar machen.

This essay takes the 30th anniversary of Ingeborg Maus' best-known book, 'Zur Aufklärung der Demokratietheorie' ('On the Enlightenment of Democratic Theory'), as an occasion to examine the program of her critical theory in an independent research study. In the first chapter, the characteristic features of this program are presented, with Horkheimer's and Adorno's 'Dialectic of Enlightenment' as the point of reference. The second chapter then shows that Maus' program of an enlightenment of democratic theory is characterized by a specific Rousseauism, which is to be seen as the 'undialectical' basic structure of her critical theory. The last two chapters are devoted to the concrete object on which Maus carries out her program: Immanuel Kant's philosophy of state and the current reception of this philosophy. While the third chapter, looking at Kant's late 'Staatsrecht' in the 'Metaphysics of Morals', demonstrates the power of Maus's program in the field of Kant scholarship, the last chapter argues that her approach reaches its limits on this very object, Kant's late 'Staatsrecht' of 1797. Because of her in crucial respects 'undialectical' epistemological interest, Maus is unable to recognize Kant's thoroughly dialectically organized philosophy of state in the 1797-text. This negative insight opens up the possibility of modifying Maus's program of a critical theory.

In Kantian philosophy, the evil heart is constituted as a system of self-degrading and self-deranging freedom by the coordination of two voluntary acts: the act of establishing radical evil and the act of a voluntary lie to oneself. The consequence is a kind of "madness of freedom", which characterises the self-deception of evil. By discussing Kantian rhetoric as an elaborate art of writing, this structure will be explored via a new approach to reading 'On Radical Evil in Human Nature'. The result is that it is the mere possibility of a lie to oneself originating in freedom that makes it impossible to cognise whether one's heart is good or systematically evil.

Kant's 'Staatsrecht' in the "Metaphysik der Sitten" very likely represents the sharpest analysis and critique of democratic modernity after 1789. This, however, had to remain unrecognized as long as the repeatedly lamented problematic nature of this late text was attributed either to the alleged senility of the author, or else confusion created in the course of the printing process was blamed for its inscrutable composition. In fact, however, it is an expression of the brilliance of a philosophical rhetoric that has remained unexplored to this day and must be regarded as the culmination and pièce de résistance of Kant's oeuvre. By focussing the attention to this piece of writing for the first time in the history of Kant scholarship, Martin Welsch uncovers a hitherto unnoticed variant of the notion of radical popular sovereignty that sheds new light on our political present.

Wir leben in einer Zeit der Denkmalstürze, und auch Oliver Eberl verfolgt denkmalstürzlerische Absichten mit seinem Buch Naturzustand und Barbarei. Neben den gesellschaftlichen Denkmalstürzen – man denke an die von Demonstrantinnen gestürzte und ins Hafenbecken von Bristol geworfene Statue Edward Colstons im Juni 2020 –, seien zur Aufarbeitung des kolonialen Erbes auch begriffliche Denkmalstürze vonnöten. Wie postkoloniale Ansätze es fordern, müsse der begriffliche Bestand der Wissenschaften auf seine koloniale Prägung hin durchleuchtet werden. Denn auch Begriffe und ihre Bezeichnungen können bekanntlich koloniale, abwertende und rassistische Wahrnehmungsmuster in sich tragen und so eine Tiefenwirkung bis in die Gegenwart entfalten. Während derlei Bemühungen in der Soziologie und Ethnologie bereits auf der Tagesordnung stehen, seien sie in der Politikwissenschaft bislang ausgeblieben. Oliver Eberl möchte diesbezüglich nachhelfen. So will sein Buch mit einem Schlag gleich zwei Leitbegriffe der Politischen Theorie, Philosophie und Ideengeschichte stürzen: den des Naturzustands und den der Barbarei.